Ken Olsen, the founder of minicomputer and client/server company Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) died on Sunday. He was 84 years-old.
Olsen started out a maverick, pioneered and drove the minicomputer and supermini revolutions, and then became a dinosaur. But unlike many other senior DEC executives he remains a much-loved …

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First pdp had how many bits?

If one looks up the history of DEC and even further looks at the pdp-1, they might find that it has 18 bits. Yes, there were DEC machines that were 12 bits (pdp-5, pdp-8, pdp-12), but the first one had 18 bits. Some of the DEC machines that had 18 bits were pdp-7, pdp-9, and pdp-15 (there may have been more).

Of course, one can also look to non-S/360 machines of IBM -- 36 bit 709/7094, and of course the IBM 1130 - 16 bits.

Real people used IBM's "personal computer" of the 60's: The IBM 1620. A marvelous computer to learn on.

The IBM 1620..

Looking back...

Talking as an ex-DECcie: thanks for allowing me to take part in that terrific adventure called "Digital". Looking back I can honestly say those were the best professional years of my life. I never found that original Digital spirit in any of the other companies I worked for. Too bad it did not last: I jumped ship just before the Texas cowboys took over but the downturn was already started by then ( what is mister Palmer doing these days?).

RIP Ken...

I was lucky enough to work for DEC in Harefield house back in '93 for 3 years, the culture was great, the Alpha was just coming along and there was a buzz..

Fond memories of a time gone by.. Although I feel the need to point out that VMS/Alpha is not dead yet.. for instance, the Deutsche Borse (German stock exchange) system runs on a cluster of 14 VMS Alpha nodes.. of course it will eventually end up on linux on x86 hardware..